Taiwanese computer giant Acer has said it will increase costs across the board 10% as a direct result of Trump’s tariffs. The tariffs won’t affect anything that leaves China before the end of February, but as we move into March you can expect the prices on Acer’s laptops, monitors, and other components to rise.
Acer’s most expensive laptop, a $3,000 gaming beast, will soon cost $3,300. Its high end monitors will go from $999 to $1,099. The price of every tablet, graphics card, and Chromebook it makes will go up.
Acer CEO Jason Chen was clear about the source of the price hike in an interview with The Telegraph. “We will have to adjust the end user price to reflect the tariff,” he said. “We think 10% probably will be the default price increase because of the import tax. It’s very straightforward.”
Chen said that he had already moved the manufacturing of some goods outside of China during the first Trump term which saw the President impose a 25% tariff. That’s helped keep costs down and Chen said that Acer would continue to look for other assembly and manufacture options outside of China. Even building stuff in the U.S. is on the table.
But setting up new logistics and supply lines takes a lot of time. While companies move to avoid Trump’s costly trade tariffs, the consumer will eat the cost. Trump promised this wouldn’t happen on the campaign trail, but it wasn’t a promise he would ever be able to keep.
Trump’s tariffs were always going to hit gamers hard. The Consumer Technology Association put out multiple reports last year that outlined how bad prices would get as Trump waged his trade war. Gamers have only just begun to feel the burden. “They’re taxes that importers in the United States pay and foreign governments and foreign countries do not pay those tariffs. So when I say they’re regressive, it means that they harm poor people and people of little means more than they harm wealthy people,” CTA VP of International Trade, Ed Brzytwa told Tom’s Hardware last year.
Last week Trump signed a “Reciprocal Tariff” which is set to upend the global trading order even more than previously thought. Prices may be worse than CTA’s worst-case scenarios outlined last year, but it’ll take time to see how things play out.
Trump is capricious. He imposed tariffs on Mexico and Canada only to put them on hold days later. It’s hard to know which tariffs are real and which tariffs are negotiating tactics. We won’t know what’s real and what’s fake until it hits our pocketbook.
With Acer announcing a price increase, it’s officially hit our pocketbook. Last week, a journalist asked Trump if prices would go up following his signature of the reciprocal tariff. “Not necessarily. I mean, not necessarily,” Trump said. “But I’ll tell you what will go up is jobs. The jobs will go up tremendously. We’re going to have great jobs, jobs for everybody. This is something that should have been done many years ago.”
Prices on Acer goods have gone up since then. And the U.S. has lost tens of thousands of jobs, most of them cut from the federal government.
